market folly

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway recently increased its stake in Tesco, an international retailer that is traded in London as TSCO and on the pink-sheets as TSCDY. This is the first time that Berkshire has filed a regulatory disclosure regarding Tesco and we'll get into the history of the stake below because they've held a position for a few years now. The gist of this most recent transaction is that Buffett bought more and now owns 242,153,373 shares, or 3.02% of the total shares outstanding. This is the latest move from Berkshire Hathaway, the vehicle of this legendary investor and you can learn to follow in his footsteps of course by starting with his recommended reading list.

In the past, we've detailed how Buffett already owned Tesco even though he had not filed with regulators. (He originally revealed this position in one of Berkshire Hathaway's annual letters). Back then, he owned 229,070,000 shares (or around 2.9% of the company). Since the position was below a 3% threshold, he was not required to disclose it to regulators. Now, however, Berkshire Hathaway has added around 1.85 million shares of Tesco to bring their total over this trigger-point. For nitpickers like us, it was kind of comical to see Berkshire actually make a mistake on their filing as they stated their position had gone 'below 3%' when in fact it had gone *above* 3% since this is the first time they've filed.

So, the main thing to takeaway here is that Buffett's Berkshire has added 1.85 million new shares since the last time we saw a disclosure regarding their Tesco stake. And, now that they're above this threshold, we'll see future updates regarding their position. For the rest of his investments, head to Warren Buffett's portfolio. In other resources regarding the Oracle of Omaha, we also posted up a multi-decade look at Buffett's career for those interested and notes from Berkshire's annual meeting.